It looks like a box to me... In any case, double posting is frowned upon.
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soandosAug 16 '11 at 17:46

3

@soandos what other post are you talking about? also, it isn't supposed to be a box. that's why I'm asking the question. Someone asked a question on askdifferent and typed a unicode character there, but on my install of Chrome I see the generic box.
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Michael PryorAug 16 '11 at 17:52

3

As do I... It appears it is not an issue with your chrome install, it is for all chromes. FF recognizes it fine. Chrome cannot even recognize it as a Unicode charachter (I don't think).
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soandosAug 16 '11 at 17:57

Interestingly, Chromium on Ubuntu does just fine.
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KibbeeAug 20 '11 at 1:02

6 Answers
6

The browsers are encountering the problem of "The selected glyph is not in the specified font". There are two directions you can go from here: you can either pull the equivalent glyph out of another font (which will often look broken but it may not be clear why to the user) or just display a character-not-found placeholder (which will always look broken, but at least obviously so).

I imagine Firefox and Opera recognise that the glyph being requested is a symbol that is safe to pull from another font, while the remaining browsers are being conservative and just showing the "Uh... dunno" glyph.

I believe Chrome and Safari both use Windows GDI for text rendering on Windows. IE9 uses DirectWrite which appears to have the same behavior as GDI in this case.
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Craig WilliamsAug 20 '11 at 0:35

Interesting: You get the same result if you paste it into the address bar.
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xpdaAug 20 '11 at 2:08

@xpda you're right; the character works in the address bar and the body on Firefox, and does not work in either place in Chrome. Fascinating.
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Jeff Atwood♦Aug 20 '11 at 2:41

5

Sounds about right: Chrome and Firefox both use Uniscribe to render text in-browser, and Uniscribe just returns an error code to the calling application when a particular character can't be found in the current font. It's up to the application to decide whether Uniscribe should then use font fallback to find a substitution, or whether it should just render the box glyph. Chrome is one of the browsers that just says "Whatever, I don't care. Box is fine."
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Mike SprossAug 20 '11 at 3:10

The question asking "Why is that Unicode character, [...] undisplayable in Google Chrome on Windows 7?" is the

That particular character is simply a unicode codepoint which is an arbitrary number. There are a lot of unicode codepoints that do not have an 'official' symbol. Even if they do have a symbol, it is not necessarily the case that your font has a symbol for that codepoint. If you choose a different font, you may end up with a different symbol.

I looked at the CSS for the page and it shows this character displaying in Arial (plus a bunch of other fonts that do not matter). Windows comes with Arial so it should always pick up that font first. It looks like Arial does not have a symbol for that unicode codepoint. Anytime you do not have a glyph for a codepoint, it puts in some form of a box indicating there is no glyph (as others have indicated).

The bigger question is, what exactly is Firefox or the other browsers doing where it works on Windows. I looked at the other fonts listed in the CSS (I thought it may be falling back on the next CSS font) but they also do not have a glyph for that codepoint. One possibility is that Firefox actually ships with its own fonts.

Digging into firefox, I did notice some fonts for math symbols here: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\res\fonts'. Perhaps this is where it is coming from.

I know this is a bit of an old question, but for those who are freshly Google'ing this, I have a solution that worked in 2013. First, you must confirm that you have a font installed in your Windows 7 PC that can render the font: